JPEGMAFIA – ‘Experimental Rap’ review: hip-hop’s biggest provocateur is in ferocious but formulaic form

If an artist releases an album called ‘Experimental Rap’, what do you really expect you’ll get? Some emo-country? Brazilian funk? Amapiano? Probably not. But it’s hard to take JPEGMAFIA solely at his word, so you’d be forgiven for second-guessing yourself.

Peggy – as he’s known to fans – has always thrived where irony and sincerity become indistinguishable: a visionary artist, but also a bit of a troll, equally comfortable covering Carly Rae Jepsen as pushing hip-hop’s boundaries. He spent this new record’s rollout dressed in all-black and leather, cosplaying dystopian supervillainy, engineering beef with his peers and proclaiming himself as the genre’s dominant force. He famously loathes music journalists too, so when he names his album after a pigeonhole phrase deployed by the kind of writers he’d smack-talk online, you genuinely can’t tell if he’s being serious or not.

Six albums in, ‘Experimental Rap’ does deliver on its mission statement though: a scattergun onslaught of disorientating hip-hop that rarely stops for a breather. Lead single ‘Babygirl’ hypnotises you with chopped-up production before bursting into early-2000s metal guitars. ‘¥ (Yen)’ sounds like an arcade machine falling headfirst into the Matrix. ‘Pop This Heat’ pivots into gospel flourishes and soaring soul, while Kanye West’s ‘All Of The Lights’ gets flipped on ‘Lights’, a pointed move, given what’s elsewhere on this record.

With the leather gloves firmly off, Peggy’s button-pushing tendencies are fully unleashed in its more divisive moments. ‘1st Amendment’ crams four Charlie Kirk references into its opening verse. On ‘Since I Met Ye’, he fires back at fans who criticised his Kanye association, the same rapper he was calling “a Nazi” in 2023 before collaborating with him less than a year later. On ‘Chat’, he performs a bait and switch, proclaiming that Derek Chauvin, the officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, should be “free”, only for the punchline to come in the very next bar: “So they can put that bitch in the ground”.

Yet for all its ferocity, ‘Experimental Rap’ doesn’t fully escape its own sprawl. At 25 tracks, Peggy’s flow sounds surprisingly one-note, which, for an artist whose greatest weapon is destabilising listeners, occasionally feels self-defeating. It’s easy to switch off amid the repetition, and when a change of pace does arrive, as on the prayer-like interlude ‘His Will’, it feels less like a gear shift and more like filler. Still, standouts like ‘Tsar Bomba’ and ‘War Over Land’ showcase why his self-proclaimed status as the genre’s best still holds up.

Where ‘All My Heroes Are Cornballs’, still Peggy’s most fully realised project, made his creative restlessness feel invigorating, on ‘Experimental Rap’ there’s fewer of those moments that really bolt you awake. Online, there’s been much discussion about how “dubstep” the production sounds, but the more pointed issue is a paradox at the record’s core: Peggy is in a fierce mood, yet somehow plays it safe. It just all sounds too familiar. If you’re a long-time JPEGMAFIA fan, little here will truly surprise you.